posted November 12, 2006 12:08 AM              

Does it mean that Iraq is a huge mistake we must walk away from as soon as realistically possible?
Does it mean that the success of the next president hinges on his/her ability to remove the U.S. from the international cop role?
If so, I'd like to go on record as saying...I don't agree.
Iraq was not a mistake. You have to appreciate the big picture in order to realize that. If you get stuck on the minute points (like no weapons of mass destruction being found), then you miss the whole forest.

1) Saddam was a plague upon the land of Iraq. Getting rid of him was reason enough alone. Nuff said.

2) Iraq is a stategic point geographically, because it's right in the middle of the middle east. If the goal is to stabilize the region, this would be a good place to start.

3) It brought the aggression to the land of the aggressor. This is not happening in America for a reason. Think thoroughly about that one.

4) There was good reason to believe WMD's would be found in Iraq, in an unknown state of evolution. Didn't happen, none were found, but there was enough reason to expect differently. Who knows what the real story is? Did they manage to get rid of all incrimidating evidence? Was there too much warning given perhaps?

5) The societal hurt caused by the events of 9/11. It felt like there was a great esoteric tug to take action in response to this tragic act. You could feel it the air. Hense, the above took place.

posted November 12, 2006 12:41 AM              

iraq is now a bloodspattered hellhole worse than it was under 'suddam'.....

2) Iraq is a stategic point geographically, because it's right in the middle of the middle east. If the goal is to stabilize the region, this would be a good place to start.

bingo!!!.....yes iraq is a strategic point for attacking iran or syria....
iraq is now the most unstable of all regions in the middle east...other than the borders of israel.........like i said to point one........its moving backwards....it will not be stable anywhere in the foreseeable future

3) It brought the offence to the land of the offender. This is not happening in America for a reason. Think thoroughly about that one.

this makes no sense....what is 'not happening in america for a reason'? the 'land of the offender'? lol what does that all mean? let me know and i'll think thoroughly about it.....

4) There was good reason to believe WMD's would be found in Iraq, in an unknown state of evolution. Didn't happen, none were found, but there was enough reason to expect differently. Who knows what the real story is? Did they manage to get rid of all incrimidating evidence? Was there too much warning given perhaps?

yes, iraq got rid of the 'incriminating evidence' back in the 90's.......this was confirmed by juniors source from inside iraq before we invaded and reconfirmed by several u.s. weapon inspectors afterwards......

5) The societal hurt caused by the events of 9/11. It felt like there was a great esoteric tug to take action in response to this tragic act. You could feel it the air. Hense, the above took place.

posted November 12, 2006 12:55 AM            

Lioneye, that was the most convoluted batch of hornswaggle I've ever laid eyes on. Those arguments are completely based on a narrow emotional reaction and regurgitation of this current administrations propoganda.

'Nuff said eh? We know N.Korea has the bomb, why aren't we over there? Iran is pretty damn scary too, why aren't we in there?

posted November 12, 2006 02:35 AM              

Now, 150,000 Iraqis were killed for "peace" and removing Saddam. Does not include 1-2 million kids killed from sanctions.
If in 2075 China attains global supremacy, and decides that Canada needs a regime change, and kills 150,000 Canadians for the glorious achievment of removing the Canadian leadership, will it be justifiable?

What if Iran becomes a global super power in 2100 and decides for a regime change in America? Is there a historical guarantee that only USA will rule the world for all time to come? Is not international consensus and goodwill the correct path?
Some musings...

posted November 12, 2006 04:29 AM              

Iraq was a bloodsplattered hellhole before the coalition invaded. That's part of the point. Life has been miserable in Iraq for many years, for many Iraqi's.

Pardon my spelling, it's never been a strong suit of mine. I'm supposedly "auditory". I'll work on that.

What it is, and what it will be, are not the same thing. Look!... Those trees are part of a forest. Think big.

Take the aggression to the land of the aggressor. Self explanitory.

You were there? You know that Iraq got rid of all WMD's back in the 90's ?? How great for you. Why didn't you share that information with the administation in power?

posted November 12, 2006 04:55 AM              

1. N.O. has been vulnerable as long as it's existed. G.W. Bush was unfortunate enough to be in the house when the inevitable finally happened. George W. Bush is not the reason Katrina was so aweful. Grow up. Haters.

2.Don't know what you're refering to. Sorry. Please elaborate.

3. Building and reconstructing are going on on a regular basis. Alot of effort is going in this direction, so I don't see the merit of this point. Destruction of progress is not the fault of the coalition. Listen to the news. Who is causing the most destruction?

3.This one is too complicated to sum up in a nut-shell. In la-la-land, it may be that easy. How's the weather in la-la-land?

posted November 12, 2006 07:51 AM              

NKorea can obliterate Okinawa Base and several SKorean bases in minutes. That would mean the death of over 50,000 US Soldiers before any reaction can come from America. China wont allow any nukes from US within their range either. The conventional war would weaken American economy even if NKorea gets totally destroyed.

Iran is well armed and protected by Russia and China.
They also have a rock solid plan against the Corporation. Their conventional missiles can easily destroy Saudi, Qatar, UAE and Kuwaiti Oil wells [which are major profit centres for the USA/UK Companies like ARAMCO, Shell, Mobil and Standard Oil spin offs].
Contrary to their threats, Iran wont nuke Israel because Israel would nuke back! As simple as that.

posted November 12, 2006 11:38 AM              

only a pussy would attack the weakest opponent, the one who was not even in the battle....

only a pussy would shrink away from following the actual attacker across borders, instead paying the pakistanis and saudis, (the very states who's members actually funded the 911 attackers and the taliban) to fight the real war on terror for him.....

posted November 13, 2006 01:21 AM              

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You were there? You know that Iraq got rid of all WMD's back in the 90's ?? How great for you. Why didn't you share that information with the administation in power?

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LMAO

Petron didn't have to tell Bush. A lot of people in intelligence told Bush that there were no WMD's in Iraq. The UN inspectors also told Bush there were no WMD's to be found in Iraq. Wilson told Bush and look what Bush did in retalitation to him when he announced publically that after Bush and Cheney sent him to Iraq for an inspection he came back and told them no WMD's. Next thing Wilson knew Bush was announcing an invasion of Iraq saying they had WMD's. Which is why he went public with it. In retaliation for that the Bush administration divulged Wilson's wife's identity as a CIA agent.

Everyone knows this and we have even discussed it on the threads here many times.

posted November 13, 2006 01:45 AM              

now i can expect them to point out your errors as if that somehow discredits what i've said.....

posted November 13, 2006 01:03 PM              

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1) Saddam was a plague upon the land of Iraq. Getting rid of him was reason enough alone. Nuff said.

2) Iraq is a stategic point geographically, because it's right in the middle of the middle east. If the goal is to stabilize the region, this would be a good place to start.

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Saddam did indeed massacre a lot of minority groups in Northern and Southern Iraq, and in no way am I minimizing that. BUT now Northern and Southern Iraq are stabilized, but central Iraq, where the major cities lie (Baghdad, Basra, Fallujah etc) are destabilized tremendously--they are spiralling into increasing violence and chaos, and without a stable central Iraq, there can never be an Iraq.... this is coming from one of my best friends who is an Arab-American (his moms Iraqi, dad is Pali, he was born and raised here). I remember when he went to Iraq I warned him against it...but he thought it was going to be another "US victory" ala Yugoslavia and vs Milosevic, so he went...and now he is completely against the war because of the mismanagement, and what he has witnessed with his own eyes as being the destabilization of the most important region in the country politically. Even if the minorities are freed of Saddam now, what is sad is that they may perhaps never get their rights because there will never be a stable government, or warring factions will wipe each other out because of the destabilization and the 'divide and conquer' play going on. As an Arabic speaking troop he was able to travel North, South and Central Iraq and to communicate with the Iraqis themselves, and his perspective corresponds with that of others I've spoken with who have been in the same situation.

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3) It brought the aggression to the land of the aggressor. This is not happening in America for a reason. Think thoroughly about that one.

4) There was good reason to believe WMD's would be found in Iraq, in an unknown state of evolution. Didn't happen, none were found, but there was enough reason to expect differently. Who knows what the real story is? Did they manage to get rid of all incrimidating evidence? Was there too much warning given perhaps?

5) The societal hurt caused by the events of 9/11. It felt like there was a great esoteric tug to take action in response to this tragic act. You could feel it the air. Hense, the above took place.

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If you are saying that Iraq was the land of the aggressor, (perhaps in its wars against Iran and Kuwait), you are not considering that America was a factor in those wars. Just as America is part of the reason of why Afghanistan has been in chaos since the 80's (it was used to destabilize the USSR, and now it is too destabilized itself, because the US govt backed certain factions that were more violent, and brought them to power, in order to overturn the USSR), similarly, Iraq has also been used and Saddam was cooperated with at a certain time because the USA's best interests lied therein. Eventhough Saddam had a horrendous history of murder and massacre before he ever got into power, the US knew that...it was well aware of his violent tendencies and rebellious attitude, but it didn't do anything to punish him, it encouraged him against his war on Iran... so what land exactly is the land of the aggressor? What about the land of imperialism or the land of the instigator?

If WMD's weren't found, they simply weren't found. Whether or not they existed is completely hypothetical and irrelevant. If the US with all its satellite systems can't even detect weapons of mass destruction (these are gigantonormous systems, theyre not pocket knives that can be hidden away at the snap of your finger), do you really think they existed, were extremely developed, or were of any danger to anyone? What about North Korea, who has nuclear weapons and has conducted tests? Why don't we invade them and release the frustration of 9/11 on them? Since we have to on someone, according to your logic... And besides even if Iraq did have WMD, is America the only country in the world entitled to them? do you really expect a country that has been at war for the past twenty years to not have developed weaponry?

posted November 13, 2006 05:09 PM              

POSTED: 7:11 p.m. EST, November 12, 2006
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BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) -- Baghdad's morgues are full.

With no space to store bodies, some victims of the sectarian slaughter are not being kept for relatives to claim, but photographed, numbered and quickly interred in government cemeteries.

Men fearful of an anonymous burial are tattooing their thighs with names and phone numbers.

In October, a particularly bloody month for Iraqi civilians, about 1,600 bodies were turned in at the Baghdad central morgue, said its director, Dr. Abdul-Razaq al-Obaidi.

The city's network of morgues, built to hold 130 bodies at most, now holds more than 500, he says.(Watch latest carnage and chaos in Baghdad -- 2:53 Video)

Bodies are sent for burial every three or four days just to make room for the daily intake, sometimes making corpse identification impossible.

"We can't remove all the bodies just so that one can be identified and then put them all back in again," al-Obaidi said. "We simply don't have the staff."

Al-Obaidi said the daily crush of relatives is an emotional and logistical burden.

"Every day, there are crowds of women outside weeping, yelling and flailing in grief. They're all looking for their dead sons and I don't know how the computer or we will bear up," he said.

While no one knows how many Iraqis have died, daily tallies of violent deaths by The Associated Press average nearly 45 a day. About half of them are unidentified bodies discovered on city streets or floating in the Tigris River.

The United Nations estimates about 100 violent deaths daily. The Iraqi health minister last week put civilian deaths over the entire 44 months since the U.S. invasion at about 150,000 -- close to the U.N. figure and about three times the previously accepted estimates of 45,000 to 50,000.

In morgues across Iraq where capacity stretches beyond thin, bodies are even being turned away.

"We have to reject them," Hadi al-Itabi of the morgue in Kut, southeast of Baghdad, said he told men who turned in the bodies of six slain border policeman last week. "We just don't have enough cold storage."

Iraq's bureaucracy of death is overwhelmed.

The task of identifying and interring bodies is all the more difficult because of the clandestine nature of the killings: Increasingly, Iraqis are being killed far from home and in secret, the victims of kidnappers and sectarian death squads.

With nowhere else to look when a friend or loved-one goes missing, family members first check the local morgue.

Abbas Beyat's joined the line outside Baghdad's central morgue after his brother Hussein disappeared a month ago while driving through the mainly Sunni town of Tarmiyah, 30 miles north of Baghdad.

The family had already paid a $60,000 ransom to an intermediary who then disappeared with the money.

"There were three piles, each with about 20 bodies," Beyat, 56, said, describing the scene inside the morgue.

"The clerk told me to dig through them until I found my brother. I had to lift them off until I found him," he said. Like many of those abducted, Hussein Beyet bore the marks of torture, with holes from an electrical drill visible in his skull, Beyat said.

Others never find their loved ones' bodies at all.

The fear of leaving the bereaved without a corpse to bury is so strong that some Iraqi men now tattoo their names, phone numbers and other identifying information on their upper thighs, despite Islam's strict disapproval against such practices.

On the day he turned away the border policemen's bodies, Al-Itabi said Kut's morgue had already buried 15 unidentified corpses pulled from the Tigris River, all of them bound, bullet-riddled, and heavily decomposed.

The government cemetery in Kut, opened on September 24, already holds the graves of 135 unidentified victims.

Hundreds of such bodies have been fished ashore at the town of Suwayrah where they are snagged in nets stretched across the Tigris to prevent river weed spreading into the surrounding canal network.

Most of the dead are mutilated by torture, a practice common on all sides, but especially prevalent among Shiite murder gangs that have snatched thousands of Sunnis from their homes and neighborhoods since the February 22 bombing of an important Shiite shrine in Samarra, north of Baghdad.

Health Ministry officials are discussing how to handle the overflow of bodies. One proposal under consideration is the use of refrigerated trucks, manned by staff entrusted specifically to help identify bodies.

"That would solve a big problem for us," al-Obaidi said.

With government unable to handle the load, the task of burial usually falls to Islamic charities and other social groups that rely on public donations.

One of the biggest, the organization of powerful Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, has buried more than 3,000 unidentified bodies outside the southern holy city of Karbala since September 1, according to an al-Sadr aide, Raad al-Karbalaie.

Trucks from the capital arrive several times a month carrying loads of 50 or more bodies each, each says.

"They've already been photographed and have numbers attached, so hopefully the families can identify them someday," al-Obaidi said. "Then they're free to exhume them for reburial."

Mosques affiliated with the organization take up special collections at Friday prayers to fund the burials, while the men who inter them donate their time and labor, he said.

Um Amir's trip to the Baghdad morgue came too late.

One month after her brother Adnan Hussein disappeared while selling plastic sacks in western Baghdad's Bayaa neighborhood, the 56-year-old Sunni housewife identified him from a picture stored on the Baghdad morgue's computer.

posted November 13, 2006 08:19 PM            

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Saddam was a plague upon the land of Iraq. Getting rid of him was reason enough alone. Nuff said.

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What burns me up the most is that around three hundred BILLION of OUR tax dollars could have stayed here in the USA, improving OUR lives, advancing our science (get off oil by 2020 like Sweden plans to), rebuilding OUR infrastructure, helping OUR mentally ill and needy…..

posted November 13, 2006 09:49 PM              

since 911....al quaeda related terrorist attacks have repeatedly killed americans. .....in pakistan.....repeatedly in saudi arabia......in the u.k. subway bombing, the bali nightclub bombing.....not to mention soldiers, contractors, and journalists in iraq......

of course, ironically, the only terrorist attack on american soil after 911, an attack using WMD (the anthrax attacks)....was probably carried out by some domestic terrorist using u.s. anthrax spores, along with an attempt to blame it on muslim terrorists......

posted November 13, 2006 09:54 PM              

Big Picture..NOW!

because The President did what he did..and Our Security is top notch..American's can sleep at night...

until all of you turn on America..and bring in Our destruction..and that of the World..with your negativity...

posted November 13, 2006 10:03 PM            

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but it seems to me the people in Iraq got handed their freedom from Saddam on a silver platter, ie somebody else did the dirty work (USA) of removing their regime. I can’t help but wonder how long they will keep their freedom (once USA has removed military presence) since they didn’t EARN it…..

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This I strongly disagree with; everyone deserves freedom, it is our God Given birth right.

But I really disagree with the person who posted this thread. I agree that Saddam was an evil man but honestly, you really need to go to Iraq to see. Hell, I think we should put President Bush in Iraq and maybe he'd understand how bad it is now. It is in chaos, it is unsafe, and now it is too late for America to pull out. And this is because America decided to just dive in without a plan to help the Iraqis govern themselves, all they were thinking about were the so-called weapons of mass destruction. They weren't thinking about "bringing democracy to the Iraqi people" like Bush claimed, they were only thinking about their own interests.

posted November 13, 2006 10:09 PM              

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exactly --lotus

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